


raindrops on roses

by pinkcupboardwitch



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Discussion of Animal Death, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Just Add Kittens, spiritualism au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27537721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/pseuds/pinkcupboardwitch
Summary: For a child like Nasi, the city is full of ghosts. Some of those ghosts have whiskers, tiny paws, and tinier ears.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	raindrops on roses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OrchidScript](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrchidScript/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Arcana Mortis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23552770) by [OrchidScript](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrchidScript/pseuds/OrchidScript). 



> Birthday fic for Orchid, blithest and most talented of Scorpios. This work is based on her Victorian Spiritualists AU, which is a wonderful autumn read. Hope you enjoy it, darling ~

For a child like Nasi, the city is full of ghosts.

It started with the flowers. Colorless daisies blooming in the snow at midwinter, roses gossamer as moonlight bestrewing doorways and walkways, leaves of perfect silver whirling through the air on winds no mortal ever saw, and Nasi the infant laughing in her cradle and waving her hands at them. Touched by the Good Folk, sympathetic neighbors said when they saw her eyes wide and laughing at nothing. What a good imagination, dear, her teacher said when she was old enough for school and drew her sights on the slate. But Nasi knew it for truth. She knew every leaf, every petal by name.

Once a flower seller at dusk took pity on her and handed her the last unsold bunch of withered violets. Out of sight around the corner, Nasi blew on the flowers until they shivered to silvery life again, shedding their faded purple like she shed the cheap brown paper that wrapped them to the ground. She carried that bouquet of ghostly violets with her for months. People she passed never saw or smelled them, but they smelled the _memory_ of violets – ribbon, sunlight, spring, love – and smiled on her as she went.

Over the past year, she’s begun to see the flowers less. Part of growing up, Holland had told her when she asked. It passes. Did _you_ ever see flowers when you were little, Nasi had demanded, one protective hand on the phantom poppies and cornflowers in her sash.

He had given her his slow, one-sided smile. Trees, he’d said. Not flowers. When I walked through the harbor, I could hear every plank singing of forests and tides.

And now? she had demanded again. He’d run a hand over a hand over the worn, pockmarked wood of the table they sat at. Hickory, he’d said. He’d smiled again. I haven’t quite lost it. Only wood and green things speak so much more slowly than other shadows. You’ll see.

She has. She has so many friends now. Only sometimes these friends bring a sting of sorrow with them that her flowers never did.

“People are _awful_ ,” Nasi mutters as she lugs the heavy sack up the stairs along the river wall. “Bricks! What will they think of next?”

A chorus of pitiful meows emerges from inside the sack. A small, silvery head pokes through the burlap, and then a second. The kittens’ ghosts blink in bewilderment at Nasi.

“Hello, _you_ ,” she tells them more gently. “Come on. Come up with me. You can stay with _me_.”

More tentative mews. A third head pops out. Impossible to tell any color a spirit may have had in life, but this one looks like a second striped tabby, like the first of its siblings. The middle looks like it was a patched kitten, with a mark like a pansy leaf in the middle of its forehead.

“Come on,” she repeats as she tucks the still-closed sack behind a loose stone and runs her hands over it, not quite touching. The first, bolder tabby flattens its ears, then rubs its cheek against her hand. For the first time since she’d heard mews and felt soft kitten ears under her hand, calling her towards the river, Nasi smiles. “Come along.”

The trip home is a noisy one. Nasi, for one thing, keeps chattering to her new kittens and looking behind her to make sure they’re still there. Eventually, tired out, they climb into her pockets and she carries them there, still talking. Overhead, sparrows chitter and whir, a full half of them so silvery they vanish and appear again as they wheel in the winter sunlight. A dog lies sunning in the roadway, completely indifferent to the wagons and foot traffic that pass through its faded form. When it sees Nasi, the dog woofs and lumbers to its feet, then lopes through – and also _through_ – the crowd of pushcart vendors, East End shoppers, stray urchins, and mud larks to sit lolling and grinning at her feet.

“Hello, Rover!” She stops to scratch him under the chin. The neighborhood is well used to her after nine years: the abrupt stop that would get any other offender pelted with oaths and shoves is instead treated with absolute equanimity. Mr. Hemmings, who runs the sausage cart night and day, even grins as he moves his cart deftly around her and scratches his salt-and-pepper beard.

“Who’s your friend today, Nasi?”

“Rover,” Nasi replies with dignity. Mr. Hemmings is looking well over Rover’s head and completely missing him, but she’s too polite to say so. “You remember him. He’s doing so much better now that he hasn’t got that liver problem anymore.”

“Oh, of course, of course…”

Distracted by a band of rolling-gaited sailors, Mr. Hemmings turns to bawl out his wares to them. Nasi gives Rover a good-bye pat and hurries on, kittens squirming in her pockets. Even through the din, she hears one chirp.

On the seventh floor of the tenement building, she lets herself in with the latchkey and immediately trips.

“Athos!” she scolds. “We’ve talked about this! _Holland_ ’ _s_ talked to you about this!”

The lanky white cat at Nasi’s feet just cries again. The two white cats that Holland keeps are identical so long as you don’t flip them over to check, but they can always be told apart, because Athos is the pest. Twining around people’s ankles as soon as they enter, poking a nose or a paw into everything they cook, following on their heels in the kitchen, begging for scraps, stealing thimbles, shredding curtains, fighting Nasi’s rag doll until Nasi came upon him in a panting, wild-eyed heap of rags and stuffing: every sin that a cat can wreak, Athos has done.

Nasi mutters as she turns out her pockets and the kittens land with soft plops on the hickory table. Athos, stretching up to sniff at her pockets for the stray hope of a treat, blinks and drops back down to all fours. The kittens ignore him, and serve him right, Nasi thinks belligerently as she searches the kitchen for milk and a clean saucer.

Ghosts don’t have to eat, but they enjoy treats. A few months ago, Holland had written a paper on it. The redhead toff and the spiky androgyne and the man with many earrings who smelled like spices and the other toff with freckles had all come to their studio to argue and drink about it. She remembers, cutting through the din of cigarette smoke and many voices in many accents, Holland’s slow deep bass as he suggested his idea: ghosts don’t need material sustenance, it’s the thought that comes with being offered food that sustains them. She could have told them so. She’d told Holland that the next morning as they aired out the studio together and washed up the plates from the night before, and he had laughed. Schatje, he’d said in the Dutch that came so much more naturally to his tongue than English, you are right. Much less nonsense in the world would be talked if we asked the children more often.

A few minutes later, he said, I know you are feeding the ghost of the rat we caught last week.

You can’t see him!

No, but I know.

Ghosts can’t spread disease, she had offered. Holland just sighed.

“Holland,” she calls now. She grips Athos by the scruff and hauls him off the table just as he’s about to shove the kittens out of the way for the milk. “Holland, are you home?”

A burst of birdsong fills the air as she pokes her head into the bedroom-cum-office they share. The finch, head settled on his shoulders today, flutters down to her shoulder. Nasi drops Athos and he bolts onto the windowsill. Besides their appearance, the only trait Holland’s cats share is their viciousness. The first animal ghost Nasi ever saw was this one, screaming in terror as the two cats batted his ruined corpse back and forth. His ghost had been caught by one foot in his ribcage. The cats, licking their chops, kept trying to snap at his ghost too. Nasi had pounced and shooed them both away, cried over the sad little body, buried him in a shoebox. She had thought him gone, but that night she woke to birdsong over her pillow and the grip of tender little claws in her hair.

The bedroom is empty. Underneath the bed, someone spits. Nasi wrinkles her nose, grabs a dry pair of stockings, and turns away.

She spends a happy quarter of an hour playing with the kittens. Under the influence of warm milk and a hair ribbon dragged enticingly beneath their noses, the kittens warm up quickly. Soon they’re whirling around the room on a mad spree like a trio of autumn leaves caught on the wind. Nasi giggles as little ghost claws prick and climb up her stocking, then waves the ribbon again to lure them off. Then she hears the key in the door.

“Holland!” She bolts to him. Holland stands in the doorway for a moment, stroking her hair bemusedly, and looks around the room.

“I see an empty saucer with milk on the table,” he says in his slow voice, “and no books or homework laid out, and someone’s –“ He pretends to pinch her cheek –“hair ribbon lying halfway across the room. Nasi, how many did you bring home?”

“Three,” she answers. She looks down at their feet and giggles. “Lily is climbing your leg.”

“Ach, so.” Holland steps carefully into the room so he won’t dislodge the little tabby, deftly intercepts the wailing Athos with his foot as he runs up to greet him, and closes and latches the door behind him without so much as ruffling his hat. Nasi follows him to the little kitchen area, helping him carry his magician’s case.

“They won’t cost anything to feed,” she says anxiously as he takes off his shabby, smoke-smelling overcoat and hangs it up. “Or take up any space. They – they might knock over a few things from time to time, maybe, but –“

“Nasi, did I say anything about making you get rid of them?”

She closes her mouth with a click. In a moment she opens it again, but this time it isn’t to say what she’d meant to say. Her voice comes out very small. “Someone drowned them. They’re so small and someone drowned them.”

“Is that why you changed your stockings and your shoes are wet through?”

Nasi’s lip quivers. He can’t have seen it, his back is turned, but Holland turns swiftly and sinks to be level with her. “Nasi?”

“People are _mean_!” It bursts out of her. “People are _awful_! People are awful, nasty, rotten stinkers –“

“Nasi.” He’s stroking her hair. The lines of his face are harsh and stark: cruel, Nasi might say, if she knew the word and if it were not so utterly impossible for Holland to be anything but kind. “I know. I would not have had you find out like this for the world.”

In years to come, Nasi will think of this moment. She will be older, know far more about the cruelty of the world beyond a stranger’s hardheartedness to the helpless and inhuman, know more as well about the things those kindly hands have done in the world outside their home. The things – vicious, terrible, bloody deaths; tales of cold misery and depravity – he has seen as a medium, and still he grieves with a little girl over three dead kittens.

He blinks and looks down for a moment, still stroking her hair. “The little one climbing my leg. Where is it now?”

Distracted, Nasi looks. “She – oh, she’s behind the table leg now. She doesn’t know you yet.”

“She doesn’t know me yet. Well, that’s fair. I don’t know her yet either. Schatje, introduce us.”

Nasi giggles: a little watery, but a giggle. “Here, babies.” She sits back and pats her lap; the kittens climb willingly into the bowl of her skirt, leaving no mark or dip of their weight. “Lily – you know Lily. She’s the bolder tabby. Bluebell is the smaller one – but you should have seen him going after the vase! I just barely caught him! And Dandelion – here, Dandelion – she’s not a tabby, but she’s got little socks and mittens like them and this little mark like a leaf on her head.”

Holland extends a hand. Nasi, ready with Dandelion, holds out the little cat and guides her paw down onto his hand. Holland raises an eyebrow. He can’t see animal ghosts, but when Nasi serves as a conduit he can feel them, just as he’s feeling tiny pinpricks from Dandelion’s nervous claws.

“A pleasure, Juffrouw Dandelion,” he says gravely. “Juffrouw Lily, Meneer Bluebell.”

Nasi beams. A thought occurs to her. “How would you say those in Dutch?”

“Paardebloem. That’s Dandelion. Lelie, Lily, that’s easy enough. Klokje for Bluebell.”

“Little clock?” she asks, delighted. He tweaks her nose with a faint smile.

“Yes. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I do know that if you look at the big clock, there, it is late, and I know a schatje who is about to become a hongerje if she doesn’t eat soon.”

“I’m not hungry,” she starts to protest, then realizes she is. Again there is that faint, slanting smile from Holland as he rises and heads for the kitchen.

“Let’s see. Milk for our guests, so bread and honey for you, to be fair, and a slice of liver for this fine gentleman,” he says, addressing this last to the frantically gesturing Athos. “Ah,” he adds, tone light with irony as the bedroom door is pushed open from within, “the lady deigns to join us.”

Nasi lifts her feet up well out of the white cat’s reach as she stalks along. Athos is a pest, but Astrid is just mean. Bony and ill-tempered, she spends all day slinking beneath the furniture, hates everyone, and claws and bites Holland on a regular basis. She has only clawed Nasi once. Holland, stone-faced, had tended to Nasi’s scratches, then lifted the guilty cat by the scruff and took her into his room with a bowl of water and handful of salt for a silent half hour. Astrid never touched her again, but Nasi still avoids her.

Astrid pauses now to stare at the kittens romping along the couch, then lays her ears flat and gives a venomous hiss.

“No,” Holland tells the white she-cat as he lifts her onto the top of the bookshelf. Disgruntled, Astrid turns her back to the room and begins washing herself, one dainty white leg stuck high in the air.

Lily gives a tiny chirp of triumph and sticks her nose out from behind Nasi. Nasi laughs and catches her carefully in both hands, then gives another gurgle of laughter as she feels a cold kitten nose and raspy kitten tongue on her cheek.

“Tickles! Holland! Holland, look! They’re washing me!”

“I see it, schatje.” A smile in his voice.

Underneath her ear, very softly, Bluebell starts to purr. Nasi raises a hand to stroke his soft, intangible back. The little pot-bellied stove is glowing like a cherry. Athos chirps; Astrid spits. The finch begins to sing.


End file.
